The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (15 page)

But that’s the way it is. What is and what should be the case are superimposed.
Although they’re contradictory, both continue to exist in reality at the same time.
The same “simultaneous superimposition” is more clearly apparent in the following
attempt to answer the question: How many taxis are there in Buenos Aires?

The number is huge—as you can see just by stepping out into the street. If you
really wanted to know how many there are, you could ask, or do some research, for
example by checking the city’s list of registered automobiles, which I guess would
be in the public domain. But there’s a way to work it out that doesn’t involve any
asking or talking or even getting up from your desk. All you have to do is apply
your powers of deduction to something that’s very widely known.

From time to time, remarkably often in fact, there’s a story in the papers about an
honest taxi driver who finds a briefcase on the backseat containing a hundred
thousand dollars and returns it to the rightful owner, after a more or less
difficult search. It’s a classic news story. It might be a bigger or smaller sum of
money, but it’s always enough to solve all the problems a taxi driver might have (or
an average, middle-class newspaper reader). That’s what gives the story its impact:
the exorbitant cost of honesty. Let’s suppose—this is the first in a series of
minimal estimates that will, I hope, enhance the credibility of the
calculation—that such an event occurs in Buenos Aires only once a year.

So, if we consider the occupied taxis passing in the street, we can ask, for a start,
how many are carrying passengers who have a briefcase containing a hundred thousand
dollars in cash. There must be very few. As a result of the widespread use of
checks, bank drafts, credit cards, and electronic transfers, handling large amounts
of cash has become rather anachronistic. I’ve never gotten into a taxi (or gone
anywhere) with that amount of money, nor do I know anyone who has, but there can be
no question that such people do exist. Leaving aside illegal or criminal activities,
there are people employed by large companies that pay wages in cash, or people doing
property deals, trading on the stock market, or whatever. Let’s say, and this too is
a very conservative estimate, that one in a thousand passengers is carrying that
much money.

Now, considering that limited set, how many of the passengers riding in taxis with a
hundred thousand dollars would forget about their briefcases and leave them behind?
I know I wouldn’t, no matter whether the money was mine or someone else’s (though I
don’t know which situation would make me more vigilant). It really is the height of
absentmindedness. No one’s indifferent to money these days, whatever they say,
especially when large sums are involved. So we can reckon that of a thousand
passengers who take a taxi carrying a hundred thousand dollars, not more than one
will leave the money behind. (Though maybe there would be more than one, because a
familiar psychological mechanism ensures that the more you worry, the more things go
wrong.) And even if it’s fewer than one, the overestimation will be offset by the
cautiousness of my previous estimate.

So, given the very restricted set of taxis in which someone has left that enormous
amount of money, we still have to work out how many of the drivers would demonstrate
a superlative probity by finding the owner and returning it. This is trickier, and I
suppose that estimates will vary according to people’s ideas about human nature.
Some will say no one’s that honest, while others will consider such a claim to be
abstract and theoretical, and prefer to think that, confronted with a real situation
of this kind, most people would obey the voice of conscience. Personally, I’m not
sure what to think. I’ve never had to make the choice; I’ve never faced the
test.

I’m envisaging it as a statistical possibility, and if I really had to choose, I
don’t know what I’d do. It’s important to remember that honesty is an abstract
concept too (however much I like to think that my own is beyond doubt). No one
chooses to be a taxi driver; not for a whole working life, anyway. It’s hard work,
and, these days, a hundred thousand dollars must be equivalent to twenty years of
taxi driving. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d say that, faced with a choice of
this kind, one in a thousand taxi drivers, on average, would return the loot, and
the other nine hundred and ninety-nine would hang on to it.

Having arrived at these estimates, we can reverse the process to work out how many
taxis there would have to be for one honest taxi driver to return a hundred thousand
dollars to a passenger who happened to leave that amount of cash behind, which is
something that actually happens, and relatively often. The result is a thousand
million (the product of multiplying a thousand by a thousand by a thousand).

So that’s the answer to our initial question. In the city of Buenos Aires, there are
a thousand million taxis. Or rather, there are (as demonstrated by the calculation,
which is incontestable) and there aren’t (how could there be a thousand million
taxis in a city of ten million people?). It’s simultaneously true and false.

With this apparently paradoxical result (the paradox is only apparent), I conclude
the notes that I was intending to make during my trip to Tandil, where I arrived
this afternoon. Before beginning the journal of my stay in this pretty hill town, I
shall give a brief account of the circumstances that brought me here.

My grandmother turned eighty-five last week. She’s in good health, happy, cheerful,
affectionate, and mentally alert, although she has some minor memory lapses, which
are normal at her age, and she’s the first to laugh at them. She’s the soul and
center of the family, and when she tells us about her forgetfulness, we all have a
good laugh, too. It’s not just by telling funny stories that she has acquired and
maintained her central position. Her strength gives us the reasons to live that we
can’t find within ourselves. We’ve often wondered how someone so full of life could
have spawned such feeble progeny. The next two generations (her children and
grandchildren) are lacking in vigor, and the same, I fear, will be true of the
third, which is just coming into existence. What little energy we have, the meager
hope that keeps us going, we draw it all from her, as from an inexhaustible source.
We wonder apprehensively what will become of us when she’s gone.

As you can imagine, there’s an undercurrent of worry when we get together to
celebrate her birthday. There was a big party for her eightieth, which gathered all
the relatives for a kind of grand declaration of our dependence. From then on we
began to feel that an ominous countdown had begun. We made a special fuss this year,
too, for her eighty-fifth. Though none of us said anything, we were all privately
counting and calculating. She looked so well, it wasn’t overly optimistic to imagine
that she’d live another ten years. Why not? Ninety-five is not unheard of. And even
allowing for her inevitable decline, ten years is quite a long time, long enough
perhaps for us to find our respective ways and discover happiness, without relying
on her vitality to maintain a semblance of human life.

The day before her birthday, one of my aunts asked if my grandmother was going to use
her new age when she played the lottery. My grandmother hesitated for a while,
enjoying the attention. They had to insist: “It’s not every day you turn
eighty-five!” Which is true, and it’s also true that my grandmother is an inveterate
lottery player, who never lets a chance go by. Once, she was hit by a car, which
broke her tibia, and in the midst of the commotion and the pain she had the presence
of mind to notice the last two numbers of the car’s license plate, and before she
was taken into the operating theater, she sent one of her sons to play the numbers,
and she won. She spent the next two months with her leg in plaster telling everyone
the story.

So the day before her birthday, when she was doing her round of the neighborhood
stores, she stopped by the agency to put in her coupon. She’s well known there, a
favorite customer; they’re always having a laugh with her. In her usual chatty way,
she announced that it was her birthday and said she wanted to play the two numbers
corresponding to her age. The lottery man wished her a happy birthday, approved of
her idea, took out a coupon and started filling it in as he usually did. So, the
number was . . . ?

“Fifty-eight,” said my grandmother.

It wasn’t a joke. A minor confusion: the numbers had changed places in her head. The
man asked her a couple of times, to make sure that he’d heard correctly; at first he
thought she was kidding, but she didn’t respond to his complicit giggle.
Imperturbably she repeated, “Fifty-eight,” in all sincerity. She left with her
coupon, and it was only when she was about to wedge it between two apples in the
fruit bowl (that was the Kabbalistic site where she kept her gambling documents) and
looked at the numbers again that she realized her mistake. The next day at the party
she told us what had happened, with her usual humor. And while the party was still
going on, she went to the kitchen for a moment to listen to the radio to find out
how River (her team) was doing, and it turned out that 58 had won a big prize.

That’s where the money for my trip to Tandil came from. My grandmother knew I’d been
dreaming about it for years; she knew it was important to me. Was there anything she
didn’t know about me, and the rest of us? Deeply familiar as she was with the
mechanisms of idleness and fear that ruled all her descendants, she knew I’d never
make the trip without some kind of prompting, which only she could provide.

I have always felt that I was her favorite grandson. I have lived on that
conviction—if evasively skirting around reality, which is what my experience
comes down to, can really be called living. My grandmother didn’t hesitate to give
me half her winnings, “for your little trip,” as she said. That was all she needed
to say; we both knew what she was talking about. But there are many deferred
projects of this kind in the family, and almost all of her children, grandchildren,
and children-in-law could have benefited, as I did, from her generosity. Had she
been obliged to make a choice? What would she do with the rest of the money? I
didn’t ask myself these questions at the time, perhaps because they might have led
to uncomfortable conclusions. But after all, given my grandmother’s function as our
source of life, the fact that she had chosen me could only mean that my need was the
greatest.

The trip was (and is) related to what I’ve been claiming as my “vocation” all these
years: literature. I know that my grandmother would prefer me to have a life. I’d
prefer that too, of course. But I’m stubborn, as the weak-willed often are, and I
cling to a profession that’s really no such thing, even though I may not be cut out
for it, and haven’t yet shown the slightest sign that I am. I persist in asserting,
precisely, that literature does not require proof of aptitude. In my heart of hearts
I never felt called to literature, or saw myself doing the work that such a vocation
would entail. If I were to reply sincerely to the question of which professions I
would have liked to pursue, had I possessed enough vigor to lead a real life, I’d
have to list, in this order: ladies’ hairdresser, ice cream vendor, bird and reptile
taxidermist. Why? I don’t know. It’s something deep, but at the same time I can feel
it in my skin, in my hands. Sometimes, during the day, I find myself unintentionally
gesturing as if I were doing those kinds of work and, in a sort of sensory daydream,
experiencing the satisfaction of a job well done and the desire to excel myself; and
then, as in a dream within a dream, I begin to hatch vague plans to market my
skills, build up my client base, and modernize my premises.

What my three unrealized vocations have in common is a certain analogy with
sculpture, of which they appear to be impermanent and degraded (or repressed) forms.
My observations in this area have led me to conjecture that behind every frustrated
vocation lies the desire to sculpt.

If that’s the case, the frustration that I’ve felt with literature up till now must
also be related to sculpture. In fact, now that I think of it, the idea of basing my
literary project and my attempts to distinguish myself as a writer on the search for
“new forms of asymmetry” (to cite the title of my only published book) must have
arisen from a twisted analogy with shapes and arrangements in three-dimensional
space.

The trip to Tandil has finally confronted me with experience in itself. Before
leaving, I put a notebook in my pocket and all the way here on the bus I was writing
these preliminary notes. Now, as I begin my journal, I would like to dedicate it to
someone. The obvious person, for various reasons—loyalty, gratitude, good
manners, simplicity—is my grandmother. But no. A dark urge impels me to write
something else, namely this (as a dedication, it’s pretty dull):

“To my beloved reproductive organs.”

It’s nearly midnight; I’m sitting at a little table against the wall in this hotel
room in Tandil. The door is bolted, the shutters closed. For once, I don’t have to
look for a theme. Because today, as soon as I got here, something extraordinary
happened to me, which has not only given me a theme to write about, but has also
transformed my very person into a theme. Nothing like this has ever happened to
anybody before. I’m the first, the one and only, which obliges me to bear witness,
but also simplifies my task, since whatever I say and however I say it, my words
will automatically constitute a testimony and a proof (by virtue of the fact that I
am the person saying them).

This is what literature really is. Now I can see it. Everything that came before,
everything that people, including writers, think of as literature, that is to say
the laborious search for themes and the exhausting work of giving them shape, all of
that collapses like a house of cards, a youthful illusion or an error. Literature
begins when you become literature, and if there’s such a thing as a literary
vocation, it’s simply the transubstantiation of experience that has taken place in
me today. By pure chance. Because of a fortuitous encounter, and the revelation that
followed.